House Leaders Call on Conyers to Resign After an Accuser Details Her Charges

WASHINGTON — The top two leaders of the House on Thursday called on Representative John Conyers Jr., the chamber’s longest-serving lawmaker, to resign from Congress as widening accusations of sexually inappropriate behavior continued to roil Capitol Hill.

Speaker Paul D. Ryan and Representative Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader, each told reporters that Mr. Conyers, Democrat of Michigan, should resign after a woman who settled a sexual harassment claim against him said on television that the lawmaker had “violated” her body, repeatedly propositioned her for sex and asked her to touch his genitals.

Additionally, Representative Joe Barton, a Republican and the Texas delegation’s most senior House member, announced in an interview with The Dallas Morning News that he would not seek re-election after sexually suggestive online messages that he sent a constituent came to light.

And an Ohio Army veteran on Thursday became the fifth woman to accuse Senator Al Franken, Democrat of Minnesota, of inappropriate touching. Senior House Democrats began calling for Mr. Franken to resign.

For weeks, both the House and the Senate have been reeling from the upheaval over sexual harassment and misconduct that already have leveled powerful men in Hollywood, Silicon Valley and media suites in New York and Washington. Thursday’s developments added to the chaos on Capitol Hill as lawmakers sought to respond to allegations of sexual harassment while dealing with a proposed Republican overhaul of the tax code.

“The allegations against Mr. Conyers, as we have learned more since Sunday, are serious, disappointing and very credible,” Ms. Pelosi told reporters. “It is very sad. The brave women who came forward are owed justice. I pray for Congressman Conyers and his family and wish them well.”

“However,” she added, “Congressman Conyers should resign.”

Minutes later, Mr. Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin, told reporters he agreed. And several other Democrats, including Representative Steny Hoyer of Maryland, the minority whip, and Representative David Cicilline of Rhode Island, also called on Mr. Conyers to resign.

Representatives Joseph Crowley and Kathleen Rice, Democrats of New York, and Representative Tim Ryan, Democrat of Ohio, called on both Mr. Conyers and Mr. Franken to resign.

Mr. Conyers, 88, was hospitalized overnight for dizziness, lightheadedness and shortness of breath. At a news conference on Thursday, Mr. Conyers’s lawyer, Arnold E. Reed, dismissed Ms. Pelosi’s demand and said he was only worried about whether Mr. Conyers’s health would allow him to continue. He said Mr. Conyers did not plan to resign.

“Nancy Pelosi did not elect the congressman, and she sure as hell won’t be the one to tell the congressman to leave,” Mr. Reed said.

Mr. Reed, like some members of the Congressional Black Caucus, also hinted that Ms. Pelosi was treating Mr. Conyers unfairly.

“There are, to my count, five of these allegations against Al Franken. There are three or four against the congressman,” Mr. Reed said. “At the end of the day, I would suspect that Nancy Pelosi is going to have to explain what is the discernible difference between Al Franken and John Conyers. That is a question she is going to have to answer.”

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Representative Joe Barton, Republican of Texas, said he would not seek re-election next year.CreditJ. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press

But Mr. Conyers’s case differs significantly from the charges of groping that are bedeviling Mr. Franken. None of Mr. Franken’s accusers are employees, while Mr. Conyers has been accused of demanding sex from women in his office, and punishing some who did not comply.

Moreover, Mr. Conyers paid out a settlement, first reported on Nov. 20 by BuzzFeed News, to one employee, Marion Brown, of about $27,000 in 2015.

Ms. Brown appeared on NBC’s “Today” show and described Mr. Conyers’s conduct as clear-cut sexual harassment. She said he once invited her to a hotel room, stood before her in his underwear and asked her to touch his genitals.

“Some of the things that he did, it was sexual harassment,” Ms. Brown said. “Violating my body, propositioning me, inviting me to hotels with the guise of discussing business and then propositioning for sex. He just violated my body. He has touched me in different ways, and it was very uncomfortable and very unprofessional.”

Mr. Conyers, who stepped aside this week from his post as the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, has repeatedly denied Ms. Brown’s claims and has said in statements and through his lawyer that he never sexually harassed any of his staff members.

Ms. Brown, who appeared with her lawyer, Lisa Bloom, pushed back on Mr. Conyers’s insistence that he did nothing wrong.

“He pointed to genital areas of his body and asked me to, you know, touch it,” Ms. Brown said. “I did tell him I was not going to do that, and I didn’t feel comfortable.”

Mr. Franken faced added pressure as well. On Thursday, Stephanie Kemplin, 41, an Ohio Army veteran, told CNN that Mr. Franken groped her breast in 2003, while she was deployed in Kuwait and he was a comedian on a U.S.O. tour.

Ms. Kemplin said the incident happened while the two were taking a photo together and lasted five to 10 seconds. She said she eventually turned her body to shift Mr. Franken’s hand off her breast before the picture was taken.

“When he put his arm around me, he groped my right breast. He kept his hand all the way over on my breast,” Ms. Kemplin told CNN.

An aide for Mr. Franken told CNN he had never “intentionally engaged in this kind of conduct.”

Republicans have their own problems. Mr. Barton, who apologized last week for a sexually explicit photograph that wound up on the internet, faced new claims that he had exchanged sexually suggestive Facebook messages with a woman. In the messages obtained by The Star-Telegram, Mr. Barton reportedly asked the woman if she was “wearing a tank top only … and no panties.”

Mr. Barton later told The Dallas Morning News that he would not run for his congressional seat again. “There are enough people who lost faith in me that it’s time to step aside and let there be a new voice for the 6th district in Washington, so I am not going to run for re-election,” Mr. Barton said.

Together, the new revelations added bipartisan pressure on House leaders to take a tougher stand against harassment. A bill being considered by the House would unmask settlements paid by lawmakers under nondisclosure agreements and end a practice of funding such settlements with taxpayer money. Forty-two Republicans and Democrats have signed on to the legislation so far.

“Taxpayer dollars should not be used as a congressional piggy bank to bail out members of Congress and staff who have committed acts of sexual harassment or assault,” Representative Mark Sanford, Republican of South Carolina, said. “That this has been swept under the rug and kept from the public — both the payments and the acts themselves — makes it even more egregious because it marginalizes the victims and acts to excuse the aggressors with little to no consequences.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A18 of the New York edition with the headline: House Leaders Calling on Conyers to Step Down. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe